By the time you read this, Chris Bickle will be gone - moved on to another record, yet another plan to bring music to its knees. The Bob Pollard of minimal noise, never before has nothingness been more prolific. I'll barely have broken the shrink wrap on his last scourging only to find there's a new menace forthcoming on an even newer imprint. These 12 tracks are that menace made manifest and what lies between "The Examinatione" and "Lies on a Tranquil Brow" might just be Bickle's best bludgeoning to date. The ideas here don't grow and develop as much as they distend, percolate and eventually smother their host. Bickle can still distort with the best of 'em, but gone is the locker room machismo of "in the red" for in the red's sake. To wit, "False Dymaxion" peters out into some primordial ether like a vertigoed bolero. And while "As Wheat in Winter" sounds like a Graham Greene novel, it sounds more like Harry Partch foraging through F.M. Einheit's junk drawer. For most of us, there are 13 ways of looking at blackbird. For Chris Bickle, though, there are more than 30 ways to kill it.

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